Month: April 2006

Over the next couple of days I will be moving hosting providers for specht.com.au over to TakeThisHost where I have hrblogs.org during this time you might exeperience connection issues as the internet catches up.

Over the last couple of days I have had two bug reports on community.hrblogs.org, both have been killed. Thanks to Glenn and Gautam. I have also added another 4 sites to the list, including a couple from India.

One feature I have been thinking about is the ability to categorise by country. I am yet to do this as I think a majority of the sites are US-specific. I will see how things go.

But a number of other problems still exist when running Norton Internet Security. I am running NIS 2003 so I am not sure of the settings in other versions. I spent a while trying to isolate why I could not edit events on my home PC. It seems that in the NIS Options on the Firewall tab if you uncheck the “Stealth blocked ports” check box then you can edit events in Google Calendar.

Based on the help provided with NIS “Stealth blocked ports“:-

Blocked and inactive ports do not respond to connection attempts. Active ports do not respond to connection attempts with incorrect source or destination information.

To me this seems a good setting to have turned on, although I am not sure what it does, hence I will continue not to use Google Calendar.

Jim Durbin has begun a discussion at Recruiting.com on a Link Swap to promote HR related blogs. While the promotion of HR blogs is a fantastic idea but a straight out link swap is probably not the best way to go about it.

Good blogs require good content, good content gets noticed and the blog gains readers. For us to have a great HR blogosphere we need great content.
But it is not easy to get noticed, you need to gain the attention of readers.

Last year I created an OPML file of all the HR related blogs I could find, around 190 at the time. In January Double Dubs suggested that I use the hrblogs.org to help promote and create more of a community within the HR blogosphere as the OPML file was only useful to techie people. He also suggested that I should try and make a tool to help new entrants to the blogosphere find other HR blogs.
I have been a bit slow in getting my act together, sorry Double Dubs. But Jim’s discussion has prompted me to let loose in the wild community.hrblogs.org! This little animal is not really house trained but I thought others might find it useful to see what people are talking about and what HR blogs are out there. I will try and train the animal so that it does not spontaneously self-destruct every so often and to provide it with more features. But for now you will have to put up with an untrained animal.
The features right now:-

There has been a bit of a rush this week on posts about using blogs to help you find a job. Previously most of the discussion and example have been about corporations promoting themselves through blogs. To a lesser extent job seekers using a blog to create a micro-brand that increases their standing within a particular industry, self-promotion by stealth.

Today Hugh Mcloud points us to Tom Raffery who is in the market and wants a job. Tom lets us know what he wants, a job.

3 or 4 days ago Google inflictedGoogle Calendar on the world, yet another in their long line of Beta products. Being part geek I tried it out over the Easter break and within about 2 minutes became very unimpressed with the product. Based on the bugs, quirks and workarounds this product does not look like it has been through even the most basic of testing. Some of the issues I came across are listed below.

Unable to edit an event once you have added it to your calendar. This seems to be a common issue if you are running personal firewall software such as Norton Internet Security or ZoneAlarm. You can get around the issue by disabling security while you edit your calendar! As Barbara Krasnoff from Information Week says “you’ve got real problems if people need to disable their security features in order to use your product.”

Entering events with days of the week in the title. Google has built some intelligence into the tool to help you quickly create events, but try and create and event for “Good Friday” or “Easter Monday”, no luck. You get events on the next Friday or Monday called “Good” and “Easter” respectively.

Once you successfully create an event and go to edit it, there are no visual clues on how to change attributes. You need to click on the attribute and then the field will become a textbox.

Within a corporate environment the Calendar does not seem to work, resulting in a partially loaded page with Javascript Object errors. This I can only assume has to do with point 1 where Google is doing some really bad stuff from a security point of view.